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Visualizing data makes hearing it much easier

To operate in the crowded telecommunications industry, service providers must answer the call for speed and availability millions of times each day. To prosper, they have to pick up the phone before it ever rings.

As Italy's largest telecommunications provider, and with a notable presence in Latin America, Telecom Italia always looks for ways to improve customer experience. That means delivering the reliable service that subscribers expect today – and knowing which offers they will expect tomorrow.

We're very impressed in terms of the usability and flexibility – and time to market, too – of SAS Visual Analytics.

Fabrizio Bellezza
Vice President of National Wholesale Services and Head of Market Development

Listen to the data

As part of a program to improve customer experience for its 32 million mobile subscribers, the company had to extend and reinforce its ability to monitor network service. To make sense of the enormous amount of unique and varied data at its disposal, Telecom Italia turned to SAS for a way to make wise decisions quickly based on up-to-the-minute trends.

"We need to be able to respond quickly with new and improved offerings to our customers, and to analyze the impact of these offers for the foreseeable future," says Fabrizio Bellezza, Vice President of National Wholesale Services and Head of Market Development at Telecom Italia. "Analysis that is valuable and makes sense today may be irrelevant tomorrow. And we need to see well beyond tomorrow."

To understand how it stacks up to the competition, Telecom Italia needed to define and analyze key performance indicators for mobile network voice and data traffic. In a fast-changing market filled with devices and applications running on different generations of technology, what's relevant today might not be tomorrow. And beating the competition means always knowing the right offer for each customer at the right time.

The solution

With SAS® Visual Analytics, business executives at Telecom Italia can compare the performance between all operators for a key indicator – such as accessibility or percentage of dropped calls – on a single screen for a quick overview of pertinent strengths and weaknesses.

Using SAS, Telecom Italia adds in-memory analytics and advanced data visualization to the provider's geomarketing system, simplifying the decision-support and operational processes that go into technical and commercial planning.

"SAS Visual Analytics supports us in identifying network shortcomings and making fast improvements," Bellezza says. "It also allows us to calculate the statistical correlations between various KPIs for more effective further analysis.

"SAS Visual Analytics has allowed us to identify profitable areas that we can strengthen in terms of infrastructure and services to be marketed."

In-depth analysis of KPIs

A company whose leadership has always understood the role of sophisticated analytics in monitoring network traffic and performance, in addition to spotting trends, Telecom Italia has used SAS since the 1990s.

SAS Visual Analytics allows Telecom Italia to analyze a range of KPIs at different levels of aggregation for both voice and data traffic. These can be viewed on a single screen and can include:

Accessibility

Drop rate

Call setup time

Data throughput

"This gives us a rapid overview of areas of competitive strengths and weaknesses," Bellezza says.

It helps analyze customer behavior and create a predictive model, forecast services and evaluate the profitability of a development area after an investment.

A user-friendly format

"When initially analyzing data, it's impossible to predict the questions users may ask – and often even the users themselves are unaware of them," Bellezza says. "SAS Visual Analytics helps us gain insights by simplifying the transformation of data and enabling us to put it into a user-friendly format."

As a result, decision makers get a more comprehensive understanding of what's happening in the market, he adds.

"We're very impressed in terms of the usability and flexibility – and time to market, too – of SAS Visual Analytics," Bellezza affirms.

Challenge

Telecom Italia required a flexible, user-friendly solution for visualizing large amounts of data.

Solution

Benefits

SAS Visual Analytics allowed the company to display data in a user-friendly format.

The results illustrated in this article are specific to the particular situations, business models, data input, and computing environments described herein. Each SAS customer’s experience is unique based on business and technical variables and all statements must be considered non-typical. Actual savings, results, and performance characteristics will vary depending on individual customer configurations and conditions. SAS does not guarantee or represent that every customer will achieve similar results. The only warranties for SAS products and services are those that are set forth in the express warranty statements in the written agreement for such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. Customers have shared their successes with SAS as part of an agreed-upon contractual exchange or project success summarization following a successful implementation of SAS software. Brand and product names are trademarks of their respective companies.